Why Transcribe Your Podcast Episodes

You have a great show. You put a lot of time, energy and effort to make it so.

Why would you limit your audience and not allow other ways to consume your great content?

Are podcasts only to be consumed as audio?

You'd say: "Converting my podcast episodes to text is hard work! It takes a lot of time, and it's too expensive."

Well, the times are a-changing! It's 2025 and you can get your podcast transcribed quickly, automatically and affordably.

What is podcast transcription?

Essentially, it is the process of converting a podcast into text. You (or a transcriber or an automated transcription software) listen to the show and write down every word being said.

There's verbatim and non-verbatim transcription, but that's out of the scope of this article.

Why should you transcribe your podcasts?

Although it may not seem like a top priority, a podcast transcript comes with a lot of benefits.

It will differentiate you, ultimately improve your listeners' experience and extend your content reach.

Here's why you should convert your podcast episodes to text:

1. Make your show accessible
2. Improve your audience experience
3. Improve Search Engine visibility
4. Repurpose your content

Podcast transcripts make your show accessible

Text is essential to those who cannot access audio. It is estimated that 51 million European and 48 million Americans suffer from some degree of hearing loss.

At EFHOH we believe there to be 51 million hard of hearing people in the European Union. This is around 9% of the population of the EU, or approximately 1 in 10.

European Federation of Hard of Hearing 1

Approximately 48 million Americans have some degree of hearing loss...An estimated 1 in 5 American teens experiences some degree of hearing loss.

HLAA, Hearing Loss Association of America 2

There are others who'd rather enjoy your show by reading it:

• People with cognitive impairments (e.g. ADHD)
• Non-native speakers
• New listeners who prefer to skim-read it before listening
• Fast readers
• People with poor bandwidth or lousy internet
• People in public places without their headphones

we HIGHLY recommend posting a transcript for each podcast episode.

You may choose to only repurpose content from certain episodes, which is totally acceptable, but you should try to get into the habit of always posting a transcript to ensure you are creating an accessible podcast.

Michelle Ruoff, Live365 4

Podcast transcripts improve your audience's experience

As mentioned above, transcripts are not only for people who are hard of hearing or have auditory processing disorders.

You'd be surprised how many prefer to consume your show in text format, rather than listening to it, for various reasons.

How transcripts improve your audience experience

People can easily search

Expect a higher return-rate to your website, as your audience will come back to search it

Text is shareable / External links

Your audience will be able to share quotes from you show, thus increasing your opportunity to get external links

It saves time

Some (new listeners) do not have the time to listen to your entire episode, or would like to skim-read it before listening.

Easier translation

Text is much easier to translate than audio or video.

If you do not translate your podcast (or offer subtitles in various languages), your audience can do it for themselves (Google Translate anyone?)

Podcast transcripts improves Search Engine visibility

Search Engine Optimization improves your discoverability in the eyes of search engines.

With so much competition out there, no matter how entertaining and engaging your show is, it might get overlooked if your competitors out-rank you.

Does Google index podcasts?

The short answer is Yes.

But search engines are not quite there when it comes to accurately indexing all audio and so the searchability potential of audio is very low, if not non-existent.

But why?

This is mostly due to the fact that in order to index audio, search engines need to download and transcribe it - both are pretty expensive in terms of computing resources.

Search engines crawl and index text much better than audio or video.

Including a transcription along with your podcast provides search engines with context and boosts SEO rankings.

Once your show gets indexed, potential new listeners who search for specific phrases and keywords may reach your website.

Plan your episode with SEO in mind: think of your theme and the episode's structure, find the best keywords and include them in your show.

Generate a podcast transcript to help search engines index your show and make it available to searchers worldwide.

Remember that podcasts have the advantage of "natural language"

This is how people really talk (which is a benefit in terms of SEO) - and so a transcript will cover tons of keywords & search phrases you wouldn't normally publish, even in a well-crafted article - but these are phrases people actually use when they search.

Here's Stephan Spencer's recommendation in that context:

Another easy way to boost your reach is to create supporting content that you want to expose search engines to...

The transcript will be a particularly text-rich piece of content to post to your site. Don't just bury the transcript, feature it and present it nicely, so that users are more inclined to interact with it.

Stephan Spencer, SEO Expert 3

A transcript is good for another reason, too:

If someone reads along with the audio, she's less likely to browse to another webpage.

This directly affects your dwell time, which is an important SEO metric Google keeps track of.

Podcast transcription helps you repurpose your content

Repurposing content refers to "finding new ways to promote your content - by reformatting it and/or changing its target audience".

You can repurpose your podcast to boost your marketing strategy using content you've already created.

It's much easier once you have your podcast transcribed:

Easily extract show notes

Even if your show got side tracked from your original plan

Create a blog post

A blog post (or a series of them) will contribute to your SEO strategy and is an opportunity to engage viewers with different call-to-actions.

Pull quotes and post on social media

Pick interesting quotes or important take-aways from your episode and turn them into LinkedIn posts, Tik Tok videos, Tweets or Instagram posts.

Email marketing

Pull excerpts from your podcast transcript and email them to your subscribers.

Translate your transcript

Once you have your podcast transcribed you can translate it and broaden your reach for international audiences.

Caption your videos

Do you film your episodes? Make them more accessible to subscribers who choose to watch them without sound.

I know a lot of people—and this is myself included—who use transcripts to not only add value to the podcast, to not only help people read it as well, but also to be able to quite easily take bits and pieces out of it, to take the text out of it and turn it into something like an ebook or turn it into quote cards for social media, or use it as quotes in specific blog posts.

Pat Flynn, The Smart Passive Income Podcast 5

Wait, there's more!

Converting your podcast to text helps you repurpose your episode, and makes it accessible on more platforms, to more audiences.

That, in turn, not only increases your audience, but also makes it easier to share and repurpose your content.

Why? Because it's more likely for someone to copy and share text, a tweet or any other social post than for her to share an audio clip of your episode.

How to convert your podcast to text?

Ebby is a podcast transcription service which will automatically transcribe your podcast to text.

Thanks to automatic transcription, converting audio to text is no longer such a costly or time-consuming task.

As an automatic transcription service we transcribe fast, and provide you with the tools to edit your transcript and publish it.

We're also proud to be one of the most affordable services, human or automated.

Here are some of our main features:

References

1. EFHOH Hearing Loss Statistics (PDF)
2. HLAA Hearing Loss Facts & Statistics (PDF)
3. 6 ways to grow your podcast audience with SEO by Stephan Spencer
4. Repurposing Your Podcast Content by Michelle Ruoff
5. How Do I Produce Podcast Transcripts? by Pat Flynn